I wrote this about a year ago after going to see the movie "A Scanner Darkly." It's kind of me puking prose all over the computer screen, but it's something to start this thing.
This is a column about going to see “A Scanner Darkly.” It’s not about the movie itself, although I’m sure that will crop up as I continue.
Having just moved to Louisville, it took me a while to figure out where the second-run theaters were. In fact, I never did find any. My wife, Hallie, did it for me.
She grabbed me upon my return home from work on Friday night, with news that she had found a dollar theater. Not a second run theater that showed movies for $2.50 or something, but an honest-to-goodness dollar theater.
We checked the address on the Internet and learned the place wasn’t Kentucky — it was on the Indiana side of the Ohio River. We hadn’t been to Indiana very much since we moved — our realtor told us he never had any reason to go to Indiana even though he had lived in Louisville for some 40 years — and thought this might be a good opportunity to take a look at what was over there.
So, we went. We saw a sign for a Cracker Barrel at which we thought we might east supper. But, after much driving around and becoming acquainted with the southern Indiana countryside, we didn’t find the restaurant and settled instead of Bob Evans.
The area at which we were driving around, exit four on Interstate 65, was fascinating. It looked like an area that had achieved a lot of growth 20 or 30 years ago, and developers are trying to revitalize it now.
The mall — with the dollar theater in back — looked like the Toledo, Ohio malls that were built with I was a kid in the early 1970s or before. It had four corridors with three anchor stores and one main entrance and no discernable food court.
(Newer malls all seem to have food courts. The name implies to me that the food is on trial and we are all judges. If mediocrity was a charge, food court food would be a habitual offender.)
Next to the mall was a huge Bass Pro Shop, the kind of store that is becoming a destination for outdoors types. (In Michigan, there’s a similar store called Cabella’s that draws people from Sri Lanka, I think.)
There’s also a few other newer stores in the area, and the next exit, exit five I think, has all kinds of new development, like a new Target, a new Wal-Mart and some new restaurants.
There was a motel being torn down, right down the street from a Best Western that looked like it was built in the early days of interstate highways and still was in good shape. There was a brand new Hampton Inn and a new Outback Steak House in the same area.
What I saw was an area in the midst of redevelopment.
It was fascinating to see the old strip-malls and free-standing stores along the highway and right behind them a huge new sign and a brand-new building for Dick’s Sporting Goods.
There were three movie theater buildings around the mall. One was closed and looked like the movie theater behind the Findlay Mall that I went to as a young child. The second, the dollar theater, looked newer than that one, maybe built in the 1980s as an attempt to add more screens.
In the next block over from mall, with the Bass Pro Shop and the Dick’s Sporting Goods, — and with the new Target and other stuff on the next road over in the background — was a yet-to-open new theater being built that looked like the modern theaters with all the glitz and lights and so on.
Hallie and I proceeded to the dollar theater. It was obvious the owners weren’t putting much money into it.
There were a lot of people there, from all ages. There were a lot of teenagers and some parents with smaller children.
But, while the theater was once bright and colorful, it had been allowed to deteriorate and was kind of dingy.
For example, in the men’s restroom, there were five urinals that would not flush, and one toilet that wouldn’t stop flushing. Hallie told me the women’s restroom was in about the same shape.
The screening room itself was pretty out-of date and looked like it hadn’t been maintained with a lot of care. It was one of the few places where I have actually checked my chair to make sure there was nothing wrong with it before I sat down.
In an odd sense, it was a good place to see a movie like “A Scanner Darkly.” It’s a very dark movie about a future in which Bob Arctor, an undercover cop, is trying to bust a ring of dealers of “Substance D.” In the process, we see how Arctor gets hooked on the drug, how it ruins the lives of all his junkie friends and the cops who are trying to investigate them.
Much of the movie takes place in Arctor’s house, which once was a bright, shiny home he shared with a wife and two daughters, but has become a run down flop house for his drug-abusing buddies.
So, I thought it was very fitting to see “A Scanner Darkly” in the theater — and an entire shopping area — that was getting run down and in the process of being renovated and/or replaced.
The developers are one step ahead of Arctor, though — they are working to revitalize the area. Arctor was getting more and more paranoid as he watched his life crumble down around him.
(One note: I’d strongly suggest reading the book before seeing the movie. I read the book two years ago, and I still got a little lost in the movie’s complexity as I tried to remember the plot. It’s a powerful indictment about of drugs, drug users and a war on drugs that sometimes makes the problem worse.)
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